Should the United States end the capital gains tax? Should Spain grant independence to Catalonia? Is a carbon tax a good idea? What about universal background checks for gun purchases? These are some of the pressing national and international propositions that Bromfield students in the debate club prepare to support or oppose.
“Debate has really changed me,” Bromfield senior Ivy Wang said in a phone interview. “We research a lot of real-world topics,” and doing so has made her much more interested in law, public policy, economics, and international relations, she said.
With more than 50 members, the debate club fields teams at both varsity and novice levels and competes with other schools from across Massachusetts and the nation. The club typically competes in two tournaments a month, club adviser and Bromfield teacher Mike Poe wrote in an email to the Press.
National competition
On one track, Bromfield students compete in tournaments sponsored by the National Speech and Debate Association (NSDA). So far this school year, debate club members have attended national competitions at Yale, Columbia, Princeton, and Harvard universities and in the town of Lexington.
At the Columbia University NSDA tournament in January, Bromfield juniors Kate Selig and Nikhil Kommineni placed eighth among the 120 teams that attended. Poe said the two have ranked in the top 50 high school debaters nationally for most of this school year, although ratings fluctuate from time to time. Matthew Atwell and Vito Montesa also qualified for the Columbia tournament.
Both Kommineni and Selig have been invited to the Tournament of Champions this June in Lexington, Kentucky.
Local matches
On a separate track, Bromfield teams also compete at local matches. At Shrewsbury High School this month, they took part in a tournament that had 605 entries from 50 schools, Selig said in a phone interview. One of the most experienced debaters in the club, Selig attended that match as a team coach rather than a debater. She said Bromfield freshmen won three out of four of their events at Shrewsbury, which was both an impressive achievement in its own right and a good omen for Bromfield’s success in future years.
Local matches like the one at Shrewsbury serve as training to compete at the state level. The Massachusetts State Debate Finals, for which seven Bromfield teams have qualified, will be held at Chelmsford High School March 24. The Bromfield contingent will comprise four teams at the varsity level and three at the novice level. In addition to the debate teams, three students qualified in individual speech events such as dramatic readings and poetry.
“Debate teaches you how to have a voice and use your voice,” Selig said. Wang agreed, explaining, “I joined debate in ninth grade because I was very shy, and I wanted to change that.”
The debaters emphasized that they value learning to argue both sides of a question. (That’s essential, because whichever team wins a coin toss at the last minute gets to choose whether to argue for the proposition or against it.) “You learn to research facts and use those facts,” Selig said. “… It’s cool to learn both sides of an issue, when you didn’t know there were two sides.”
The debate club began as a current events discussion group, Selig said, and has grown rapidly over the past six or seven years. Poe has been its adviser for two years and expects to continue next year. He writes that it is important for the younger generation to learn “to think complexly and politically, to have an opinion and also be able to express themselves effectively.”
Poe says the debate teams want to make their presence known in the community just the way they appear in their competitions, in jackets and ties for boys, skirts and jackets for girls. “Expect to see us at some of next year’s festivals in town dressed up in full business attire,” he wrote. No one who knows the debaters’ achievements is likely to argue with them.
